Amazon as a white knight for Radio Shack?It's rumored that the online retailer may be out to snap up part or all of the long-term retailer. Amazon has already stepped deep into the territory of having to collect sales taxes, thanks to the number of distribution centers it's developed. A physical showcase presence may not be the worst thing to happen to the company.

Who's your buddy?Snapchat has historically told users who their "best friends" (most-frequently-used contacts) were, and posted those results publicly. Now it won't. Unsurprisingly, some users are complaining.

Gawker stunt hits new lows in tastelessnessThey manipulated a marketing algorithm used by Coke to hijack a Twitter feed to post portions of "Mein Kampf" as ASCII pictures. Tasteless, childish, and shameful. It crosses the line beyond mischief, and is yet another example why "just because you can doesn't necessarily mean you should." What good did the stunt do?

Is Google suffering from brain drain?CNBC posits the question after several of the company's highest-level employees have departed. But it's probably overstating the case to call it "brain drain" as though the situation is any different from the natural order of things: A small, young Google is inevitably hot and moves fast. A mature, leviathan Google may still be very good at what it does and might even manage to remain somewhat nimble, but there's just not going to be as much there to stoke the fire in the belly for people who want to be in the spotlight of what's new, rather than inside the machinery of what's the incumbent.

Nobody notices German-Americans anymoreThat's because their immigrant heritage has been mostly subsumed into the culture as a whole. It's an observation we should note for interactions with today's immigrant populations, too: Sooner or later, nobody really cares where your family came from. We all become Americans together.

Des Moines officials propose a new ordinance to accommodate UberAt first glance, it appears to be a responsive step in the right direction towards recognizing the reality of demand for ride-sharing services and the need for public safety. Most cities with any kind of regulation on for-hire transportation are going to have to come up with a new set of rules, probably much closer to the laissez-faire model of Uber and Lyft than to the heavily-regulated cartel model for cab services. But it really can't be a total free-for-all without serious consequences for public safety and the potential for discrimination. The transparency and accountability driven by the Uber two-way feedback model probably beats the capacity of any metropolitan government to regulate the quality of cab drivers. But there are also some conditions (like insurance requirements) that may reflect a legitimate public interest in health and safety. The key is to ensure that the regulations that are imposed are there in service of legitimate public interest, not solely for the purpose of restraining competition.

What is there to fear about smartwatches in schools?Certainly there's a knee-jerk reaction against any form of communication technology that could potentially be used to facilitate cheating. But tests aren't really the ultimate objective of schooling, are they? And if they aren't, shouldn't the emphasis really be on the teaching and learning, with matters of how the tests are administered only a secondary issue?

Sources are for the birds?The business pressures on news media have gotten to be such that editor of one newspaper (the Bakersfield Californian) has instructed staff to produce stories based really more the interest of producing something -- whatever it might be -- rather than what appears most newsworthy. This story would be so much less disturbing if it said "Everyone needs to spend one hour on a fresh short-form story each day, on or off your beat. Make it quick, interesting, and newsworthy." The memo as reported by Jim Romenesko just sounds like, "Hey, we heard about this thing called Up-Buzz-Click-Worthy, and we want you to do that instead of reporting."

Twitter says it was asked by governments for user data 40% more often in late 2014For years, futurists have predicted that some businesses would become rivals to governments, and while many of them hinted that large multi-national corporations would be the subjects, it's actually turned out to be tech companies like Twitter and Google and Facebook that have had the most visible run-ins with government officials. It's hard to blend the interests of those companies with the demands of governments.

Think twice about piling on Brian WilliamsThere's lots of armchair psychoanalysis being conducted on the NBC News anchor, and he may or may not be the villain that people like Maureen Dowd make him out to be. But when it comes to matters of memory, we should all be cautious: Human memory is pliable, flimsy, fallible, and subject to all kinds of error and manipulation. Nothing should ever be taken on just an eyewitness report. Whether it's on television, in a courtroom, or just in conversation, if you can't find corroborating evidence, you should discount the value of anything you're told by at least 90%. Don't trust eyewitnesses -- only evidence really matters.

Don't lament Jimmy Fallon -- Johnny Carson isn't coming backA TV critic finds Fallon unfunny. And that he may or may not be; there's no use disputing matters of taste. But if people expect another Johnny Carson, they will never be satisfied -- Carson was a product of a time that is irreversibly gone. He honed his broadcasting skills on the radio first, and then migrated into television -- and there's simply not enough of a farm system left in radio to produce that kind of talent, nor the stomach for experimentation on local television for an entertainer like Carson to be duplicated.

Thousands risk their lives to flee as terrorists move inOne can only hope that Westerners stay alert and sympathetic to the plight, even though the names involved are Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, and Boko Haram. If they were Germany, Poland, Denmark, and Al Qaeda, we most certainly would.

Quick observations on American businessCompanies are reporting their results from 2014 overall, and The Economist notes that the American economy remains head-and-shoulders above the rest of the world right now, but energy companies are suffering from low petroleum prices and other companies are running dangerous risks from technological change.

Group wants to install a robotic grocery store in Des MoinesAutomation continues to improve the quality of life for many people -- even while it threatens job opportunities for some. It's just like free trade: On balance, very good for most of society, but with concentrated costs for some. We're smart enough and wealthy enough to figure out how to accommodate.

90 Americans are killed on the road every dayIn a rational world, we would be more eager to do something about that than we are to be frightened by word of a terrorist threat against shopping malls. One is a known fact, killing a known number of people, and something which we could be doing more to solve. The other is a threat -- a scary one, yes, but at this stage only a possibility. We need to be rational about the things that get us worked up, otherwise terrorists succeed in disrupting our lives and harming us by just saying wild things, without necessarily doing anything at all. That is the very definition of asymmetry in warfare.

YouTube for KidsParental controls (like a timer and search settings) and bigger buttons (for fat little fingers) are part of the deal, and Google says its scope is "narrowed to focus on content that is appropriate for the whole family". What will be interesting is to watch the inevitable back-and-forth that Google has to play now that it is playing the role of content curator: Someone's going to complain that their content is family-friendly but not recognized as such. Someone else will complain that Google's standards for family-friendliness aren't stringent enough. Someone else will complain that Google is trying to impose some set of unwanted values on families (it'll probably come from showing something like same-sex parenting couples on the "family-friendly" channel, but never doubt the capacity of people to take offense.) Some will think Google's standards are too bold and others will find them too restrictive. It's not really a winning situation for Google to enter -- not when other companies (especially Disney) have owned the notion of "family friendliness" in the psychological space for decades. They'll probably come to regret not outsourcing the curation of content to others, even if the app is a success -- which it quite well may be.

China is not our buddyThe people are certainly as good and fine as they are anywhere else in the world, but the government is not

Some students will get into the U of I law school without taking LSATsFrom an outside perspective, it looks like a sensible evolution -- why impose a costly testing regime on people whose qualifications are obviously sound? Next step: Making law school (and other programs) more accessible for people who don't feel like dropping everything and enrolling in a residential program for multiple years. We have the technology to do it, just not the will.

Reality TV isn't very realSo says a former "Biggest Loser" participant, who thinks the show is contributing to lots of bad decisions among viewers who mistake the fiction for reality

Chicago mayoral race goes to round twoMoney doesn't inevitably win elections -- Rahm Emanuel had a much bigger war chest than his opponents, but still couldn't get 50% of the vote. Now it goes to a runoff.

Manipulations of power and privilegeAt least on the surface, it appears that United Airlines may have put a route into place just to please the chair of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which has supervisory power over the three major airports in greater New York City. It may be a far lesser kind of extension of privilege to the politically powerful than the apparent plunder of Yemen by its former president for an estimated $60 billion, but both situations derive from the common thread that people will seek power and luxuries, and they'll do it whether the economic system involved is free-market, socialist, communist, or otherwise. It is purely naive to imagine that capitalism is somehow specially susceptible to abuse or that government power isn't always and everywhere at risk of abuse as a tool for enhancing the lifestyles of the politically powerful. In general, the more powerful the government and its ability to regulate, the more likely (and larger) the abuses will be.

Chinese online services could be at grave riskThe government is enforcing a policy requiring people to use their real names on social networks, which is a tricky thing to ask in a place where the government doesn't take kindly to dissent

Violent crime is one of Omaha's biggest troubles right nowIt's not an especially violent city by any means, but there has been a lot of highly visible violence in recent memory. It's worth asking whether the problem is exacerbated by the fact that the Omaha metro is almost entirely under the same municipal government; Des Moines, comparable by almost every measure, seems to have less violent crime -- and it's at least possible that the difference could in part be due to the fact that the Des Moines metro consists of dozens of communities, each of which has a different police force and set of community priorities. It's much harder to differentiate efforts to respond to different problems when everything is under the same municipal government.

Berkshire Hathaway at 50 years under current managementThe widely-read annual shareholder letter from Berkshire Hathaway will be released tomorrow morning, and this one is attracting unusual interest because it will be larger and longer than usual, owing to its significance as an anniversary edition. Some speculation as to its contents:
■ Warren Buffett will discuss the type of shareholder he likes. Over its first 50 years, the company's patient, low-turnover shareholder base was a huge benefit to the company. It didn't hurt that Buffett himself controlled, directly or by significant personal influence, enough votes to keep the company doing what he thought was best for the long-term, rather than for a quarterly report. As his shares are converted to less-influential Class B shares and turned over to charity, the voting power of the remaining Class A shareholders will become proportionally greater -- and he undoubtedly hopes they will remain a solid voting bloc in favor of long-term principles. But now that Berkshire is part of the broad S&P 500 index, it has more institutional shareholders than ever, and they categorically fail to show the same kind of long-term vision that individual Berkshire shareholders used to have. The change in the culture of ownership is one of the biggest threats -- probably the biggest of all -- to Berkshire's next 50 years.
■ Charlie Munger will ponder the merit and virtues of the next generation of managers. He quite likely worries a lot about the risk of future generations of managers lacking the kinds of virtues and rationality that he so publicly espouses on behalf of the company and the culture at large. More so than Buffett, Munger tends to worry about the dark side of human nature and its tendency to do things like hoarding the perquisites of office. Munger will almost undoubtedly discuss how hard (and vitally important) it will be to recruit and keep managers who live up to exceptional moral standards. This will undoubtedly be extra-difficult in light of Berkshire's size: The larger it gets, the more likely it is to turn to the professional managerial class rather than the owner/operator/proprietor/entrepreneur class who have historically dominated Berkshire's management roster.
■ Breakup speculation is hilariously wrong. Some analysts, apparently incapable of seeing the most obvious things right in front of them, think the company may drift over time towards a breakup from its conglomerate status. It's a ridiculous guess for two reasons: First, the obvious evidence, which includes the use of the Berkshire parent company name over the company's media holdings, real-estate enterprise, automotive dealerships, and energy companies. (A company planning a spinoff of those interests or any others wouldn't double-down on the use of the brand name like never before.) Second, the considerable benefit the company gains from its position as a buyer of choice for sellers who don't want their heirloom businesses to be broken up or sold off. That reputation gets Berkshire deals that it wouldn't get otherwise, and whatever costs it pays by holding on to lesser-performing subsidiaries for "too long" by Wall Street standards, it makes up many times over by burnishing the company's reputation and standing as a buyer.
■ The cost of capital weighs heavily on the present, but that won't last. The company's low cost of capital (driven mainly by float developed by its insurance subsidiaries), historically a huge advantage, hasn't been much help over the last several years as the Federal Reserve has pushed borrowing prices to near-zero. That's been compounded by the fact that terrible markets for investments like bonds have pushed lots of capital into stock markets and private-equity investments, which has made it more expensive than usual for Berkshire to find good deals on common stocks and whole companies to buy. But that won't last forever -- rates will someday go up, and Berkshire's huge capacity to generate cash (now from operating subsidiaries in addition to the insurance float) will at some point in the foreseeable future become a huge advantage again. Anyone who barks about wanting a big dividend from the cash-rich Berkshire isn't seeing the long-term future -- that cash may not be doing much today, but the time will come again in the course of another boom/bust cycle when the company will be able to put huge amounts of money to work for eye-popping returns.

Google unveils 225-page plan for Mountain View headquartersThey propose lots of public access to spaces in and around their campus, which would also include buildings designed to transform and re-shape themselves with the help of robotics. Some of the structures would be encased in a flexible glass-like skin.

The FCC's version of "net neutrality"Companies will be prohibited from favoring some traffic over others, and basically will serve to regulate Internet access like a public utility, like landline telephone service. The problem is that most places don't have a lot of options for broadband Internet access right now, so we pay too much and get far too little speed compared to what's offered in other rich countries. And some of the incumbent providers have been bullies, creeps, and just all-out jerks to their customers. Lots of people really, really hate Comcast and Time Warner. But the hazard here is that the regulation that people want to impose on those companies (perhaps to prevent them from misbehaving) may also have the effect of entrenching the interests of those companies that are already large. That's usually the outcome of additional regulation -- to further consolidate the interests of the incumbents, even if they bristle at the regulation itself. And they're definitely not happy -- Verizon posted a protest message in Morse code (with a translation that looks like a 1950s typewritten memo, fretting about the FCC's move to "adopt 300-plus pages of broad and open-ended regulatory arcana". And that's the problem: Some sort of rulemaking power may have been necessary to prevent anticompetitive abuses by Internet service providers, given that there are so few of them today. But the sledgehammer approach adopted by the divided FCC commissioners (who voted 3-2) is very likely to make it hard for new entrants to get into the business and introduce the competition that consumers really want after all.

Hedge-fund manager is starting a unit to be run by artificial intelligenceBloomberg says that Bridgewater Associates will use trading algorithms run by computers that are supposed to learn and evolve. It's smart to create and follow rational guidelines (or rules, or in a computing sense, codes) -- but it's also important to have human comprehension about why those rules are in place and when it makes sense to override them. There's a reason we say "the exception that proves the rule". Artificial intelligence may be helpful at identifying opportunity and could certainly be used as an enhancement for lots of decisions (including financial ones, just like it can enhance medical and engineering decisions), but this kind of gambit tends to get out of hand quickly in the financial world. LTCM collapsed while being run by some of the smartest people in money.

American Meteorological Society deserves credit for consistency of principlesThe group is criticizing the efforts of a Democratic member of Congress to witch-hunt some university researchers who have been prominent skeptics about climate change. The group, while predominantly composed of people who tend to believe that humans have played at least some role in causing climate change, is standing on the principle that political witch-hunts have a "chilling" effect on research. Good for them. It's easy to say we would stand up for the rights of those with whom we disagree; it's another thing to actually do it.